This highly interactive conference, titled “Compassion and Creativity in the Community,” will invite audience participation with featured national and local leaders in a creative exploration of how compassion is valued across the spectrum of communities.

The forum provides an opportunity to reach past barriers that too often separate the academic, business, government, spiritual and medical communities from one another. Area professionals from each of these sectors will speak, focusing on the role of compassion in daily living and inviting the audience to offer, discuss, and help develop ideas that create paths to a more compassionate society.

Building empathy is at the heart of “be the change” – the new exhibit and workshop series located in Peace Learning Center’s lower level.

Empathy plays a critical role in shaping how we interact with each other, animals, and the world around us. It’s of critical importance to all good relationships – personal and professional. Some people may naturally have more of it than others. But, research shows us that it can be learned and practiced.Teachers and parents have the privilege and huge responsibility to teach empathy.

Here are seven ways to be a good empathy influence for the children in your life and set them on the path to be the change for others throughout their lives:

Kristen Zaleski is professor of Social Work at the University of Southern California (USC) and also supervises new psychotherapists in the field. She is a licensed clinical social worker providing individual and group psychotherapy for trauma, sexual assault and bereavement in Los Angeles. Her work experience includes in-patient psychiatry, in-patient medical, in-patient and out-patient oncology, and out-patient counseling for rape trauma victims.

"Being empathetic is a crucial skill set for social workers because... we aren't working with people who have had good lives."

"Empathy is a building block of self-identity."

"Say the word "empathy" around social workers and most will recognize it as a professional "must-have," even if they can't tell you exactly what it means. Scholars also disagree about the definition of empathy and what it looks like in social work practice."

According to Zaleski, she and her colleagues recruited 306 graduate social work students to complete the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy."

Empathy is a game that takes place after the fall of society. Players get to experience the memories and emotions left behind by various people through mementos. These mementos are scattered across the ruined world. In order to discover the truth about what happened to the world, players must manipulate and explore various emotions and solve numerous puzzles as they travel around.

The game is a first-person action adventure driven by story and exploration. It will feature a branching narrative connected with the players' exploration of the worlds. Players will experience the story through numerous first-person perspectives and must use their wits to put all the puzzle pieces together and discover the lore behind the world.

Helping organizations create empathy with the people for whom they design solutions means being totally present with the widest cross-section of humanity imaginable.

Given the variety of clients, we have the privilege to meet a lot of people—from soldiers to housewives, chemists to poets, wealthy to subsistence-level poor, athletes, butchers, warehouse workers, doctors, CEOs, you name it.

Typically, the more you constructively engage people with creative endeavors, in an air of respect, they open up. The trade term is Empathy; however, Empathy is such a clinical-sounding phrase. How about Humanizing instead of Empathy?

Then, there is co-creation, where we bring in groups of people to help us refine prototypes. Typically, there are three-to-six sessions with groups of six-to-ten people a piece per project.

The ability to experience several senses together creating a unique, compounded experience is referred to as synesthesia. It's believed to affect about one to two percent of the population.

People with mirror-touch synesthesia may have a heightened sense of touch that overlaps with sight and/or hearing, triggering pronounced feelings of empathy.

Even without the condition, people who see others in pain may activate the same body response that would be used if they were in pain themselves. "Mirror neurons" help people mimic and identify with what they see.

Dr. Dan talks about what is self-compassion, how to get it and how to use it to make your life better. Daniel Gottlieb, Ph.D., is a practicing psychologist and family therapist who is living with quadriplegia

Join us in our next Ask the UXperts session to chat with Indi about why empathy and active listening are such a key part of great design. The sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent.

They are text based so there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session.

Where: The UX Mastery Campfire ChatroomWhen: 3pm Tuesday 4 August PDT or 8am Wednesday 5 August AEST(or find out what time that is for you)

“These findings show how a mother’s ability to tune-in to her baby’s thoughts and feelings early on helps her child to learn to empathize with the mental lives of other people,” says Elizabeth Kirk, lecturer in the psychology department at University of York.

“This has important consequences for the child’s social development, equipping children to understand what other people might be thinking or feeling.”

“These results are significant as they demonstrate the critical role of conversational interaction between mothers and their children in infancy,”

I suggest that we remain open to the possibility that some cultures are compatible with the lived expression of empathy while other cultures suppress it.

Cuba's practice of moral medicine is the world's most compelling example of empathetic solidarity. Despite overwhelming odds, this small country of 11 million people has taken empathy from the abstract realm and brought it down to earth. We court both personal and national peril by not learning more about it.

As children, hate, violence, apathy and greed were as foreign to us as having to pay bills just to survive. We played with other children on our street, helped one another when we tripped and fell from running so fast, and really had no idea about the horrors lurking outside our neighborhoods.

We simply did what came naturally to us, not knowing we would soon become influenced by people not so familiar with basic human compassion.

In conjunction with the 2015 Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany, the Ashoka Media Globalizer brought together several Ashoka Fellows from around the world.

Throughout the forum, these Ashoka Fellows were able to connect, collaborate, and discuss their powerful solutions that are leveraging media and technology for the good of all. From improving corporate transparency and accountability in Latin America to producing fact checked, collaborative, and critical content in West Africa, these leading social entrepreneurs' solutions are grounded in empathy-based leadership.

Watch this video to learn more about why Ashoka's community values empathy as a pathway toward changemaking.

Recently, a friend with young children asked how my husband and I ‘grew such well-behaved kids’ (now age 10 and 15). My mind immediately went to the moments when they aren’t so well behaved, the moments when we, as parents, have the option of telling our children what to do and asserting our power as the heads of our houses by giving consequences when requests aren’t met.

My husband and I work best when we approach situations with empathy, work collaboratively and hold a consistent set of expectations. We attempt to actualize these values when parenting.

Empathy is a much-needed quality in a world in which fear of the “other” is used to divide and control us. So having empathy as the theme of the annual Aires Libres exhibition of public art along Ste-Catherine St. E. is timely and welcome.

Sympathy is about compassion, but empathy attempts to feel what the other person feels. “You project yourself onto another,” curator Aseman Sabet said in an interview.

President Obama has said that he hopes the next generation will be more empathetic. I hope that, instead, we can model and teach compassion to our children.

Our Erroneous Understanding of Empathy

It is common to say that modern society, or at least the twitchy online manifestation of modern society, is addicted to outrage. Interestingly, in our quest to blast others, the good intentions of the perpetrators do not spark our empathy.

As a minor example, a father wrote an opinion piece last year about how a homeland security officer “ruined” his family’s “perfect moment” during a photography session on the Cape May ferry by asking the man’s teenage daughters if they were okay.

Anyone who works in tech knows that integrating the right programming languages and using an agile development process are essential to getting a job done.

But the real key to navigating both the exhilaration and the exhaustion of working in the tech space is much more basic—and much more human.

It’s empathy.

Empathy, defined, is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” More simply put, it means being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or to see the world through the eyes of someone else.

What is an interactive business without empathy? What is a business team without an understanding of the employees’ sentiments? What is an organization serving people’s needs without an actual acknowledgement of their needs? What is a company without an understanding of how their service will actually benefit people and their well being?

A business without empathetic traits is a hollow one. Why? Because empathy is a characteristic that most successful businesses inherently require.

A business that demonstrates the capacity to see things from the point of view of the consumer, to put themselves in the consumer’s shoes, is a multidimensional business, a business that can get an accurate idea of consumer’s needs.

Moreover, an “empathetic business” is already putting themselves in a place for success by just genuinely caring for the consumer in this way.

Yet the Aurora Theater and Sandy Hook shootings hit forensic psychologist Max Wachtel especially hard, driving him to try to figure out what made these killers and other male criminals do what they do. In doing research, one common element arose—a lack of empathy—which led Wachtel to write The One Rule for Boys.

A lack of empathy can manifest itself in a variety of ways. “Almost always, it comes out as problems with anger because anger is a very easy emotion to access, but it’s a very surface emotion,” Wachtel explains. “Usually there’s something else going on like sadness, frustration, anxiety or a feeling of unfairness.”

If boys can be empathic, it helps in nearly every area of their lives, says Wachtel. He found research showing that empathic boys do better in school, have more high-quality friends, are seen as leaders and deal better with bullies. As they get older, he found empathic males tend to get better jobs and report higher satisfaction in romantic relationships and life in general. “I figured it was a good thing but it was surprising to see how much stuff it helped with.”

If you teach your children to be empathic, they will understand why so-called mean kids do what they do. It does not give those kids a free pass, and it does not require your children to pity anyone.

But, research shows that kids who are empathic are seen as leaders by their peers and are more assertive. They do better in school (and in work later on), and they better understand how to appropriately confront a school bully. Empathic kids are not pushovers--in fact, they are able to better handle conflict than non-empathic children.

My children are a gift to me, and I hope to raise them in such a way that they are also a gift to this world. At 2 and 10 they are exemplifying behaviors that reflect values most important to my husband and me.

One of the things I've always tried to do is provide them with opportunities to see other people (including me) model kindness and show empathy. Sometimes these are real life people and other times they are characters in a movie or, even better, a book.

Here are a few books that can support you in raising (more) empathetic children.

But as my colleague Leonard Medlock says, you have to be careful when finding free alternatives online, because it can lead to a “proliferation of design thinking sans any notions of empathy or learning from failure.”

Keep in mind, design thinking--problem discovery and solution generation using empathy and rapid prototyping, described as “human-centered design”--isn’t something you can just implement in a classroom lesson plan with your students right away.

You’ve got to work on the skills and mindsets yourself first, and develop an openness to iteration and a willingness to be truly honest.

When we experience empathy we feel what we believe are the emotions of another. Empathy promotes prosocial behavior. For social beings, negotiating interpersonal decisions is as important to survival as being able to navigate the physical landscape.

Empathy motivates individual behavior that aids in solving communal challenges as well as guide group decisions about social exchange. Its influence extends beyond relating to someone else’s emotions, it correlates with an increased positive state and likeliness to aid others.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.